Religion: Niebuhr’s Confession

Into the crossfire of controversy over Communism among the U.S. clergy jumped Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr this week. “It must be affirmed that there have never been many explicit Stalinists in the churches,” Niebuhr writes in the Christian Century, “and today their number is … insignificant . . . Nevertheless, there are a few and we ought to admit it . . .”

Niebuhr condemns the “hysterical labors of the vigilantes” and believes that “the matter is beyond the competence or interest of a congressional investigation committee.” But “while we deal with these issues among ourselves,” he feels it should be admitted that there has been “a very considerable Marxist dogmatism in the ‘liberal’ wing of the Protestant churches.” Niebuhr says that he and others used some Marxist doctrines as weapons against the smug, optimistic, individualistic form of Christianity the U.S. had inherited from the 19th century, and against certain economic injustices that happened under capitalism. But, he now acknowledges, ‘those of us who were critical of capitalism were … too uncritical of the Marxist alternative.” This was true, says Niebuhr, even of those who “rejected the Communist version of Marxism” and sought “democratic Marxism.” Niebuhr is ‘ready to confess to his complicity in these errors,” but is still against “the ridiculous dogma of laissez faire.”

Niebuhr attacks the frequent clerical fallacy that under socialism “motives of service” would supplant the “profit motive.” That idea “invested a collectivist system with a moral sanction it did not deserve . . . The so-called ‘profit motive’ can hardly be eliminated under any system . . . Every parson who speaks grandly about supplanting [it] exemplifies it when he moves to a new charge because the old one did not give him … a salary adequate for his growing family.”